How did the story come about?
Before he wrote The Best Man, Malcolm Lee had multiple drafts of five other scripts he was working on. For one reason or another, they were not being received in Hollywood. So, Malcolm came up with an idea: “I’m going to write something so commercial that I can sell it and make my next picture.” He noticed around that time, (The Best Man was released in 1999), that there were several “wedding movies” that were doing extremely well at the box office. But none of these movies had an all-black cast, so incorporating black characters, Malcolm wrote a script that would be commercially successful. And obviously he was right.